Our Best Option for Defending Ourselves From Trump’s Second Term Is Each Other
When Trump was elected in 2016, the ACLU’s website featured a photo of him and the words “We’ll See You in Court.” They also rolled out an online campaign asking people to take an oath pledging to defend the Constitution (no specifics about how to do that).
It was a pivotal moment — so many people were newly afraid and angry, mobilizable — yet liberal organizations like the ACLU were providing demobilizing messaging, encouraging people to engage in meaningless symbolic action, or to donate and then passively wait for salvation to be delivered by nonprofits and courts. The most visible legal battle from that time, over Trump’s Muslim ban, showed that liberals could not stop Trump in the courts.
Around that same time, Democratic elected officials from across Washington State, where I live, called a press conference and declared Washington a “hate free zone.” These same politicians, who were raiding homeless encampments, arresting protesters, expanding policing and jails, courting the tech industry, caging migrants, pandering to real estate developers, expanding fossil fuel extraction, and all the rest of government business-as-usual, tried to distinguish their own cloaked murderous agendas from Trump’s overt Islamophobia and transphobia. Their meaningless, hypocritical declaration against “hate” was mere dazzle camouflage for their pro-Israel, pro-police enterprises.
Our entire lives, the Democrats have been moving rightward. When Republicans are in power, liberals portray themselves as rebelliously anti-racist, feminist, and/or “of the people”. They hope we will follow them into liberal projects of reform, invest in state takeover, and cultivate fantasies about responsive liberal politicians who will protect vulnerable people and build governments that take care of us all.
The Harris/Walz campaign revealed yet again that we cannot vote our way out of the U.S. government’s fundamental projects or liberalism’s imperialist, genocidal commitments. With all of this revealed, we must act in accordance: divesting from efforts to reform US institutions, focusing on defending each other from them, caring for each other, and attacking the infrastructures of death that liberalism commands us to pine for.
Can we finally face that the U.S. government will not interrupt the crises that U.S. empire manufactures and exacerbates? Here, at the 11th hour of the ecological crisis, every passing day brings worsening news from scientists about faster rising temperatures, extinctions, melting ice, extreme weather, food insecurity, and forced migration greater than even recently predicted. The brutal, heartbreaking news out of Gaza confirms the bipartisan willingness to fund and arm genocide, despite domestic and global outrage. The Biden/Harris administration’s ongoing actions have made it clear as day that under either party, the U.S. will continue border militarization and immigration detention. The government, under either party, has continued to meet migration caused by U.S.-backed wars, neoliberal economic policies and ecological crisis with barbed wire, deadly cages, sexual violence and execution for those forced to flee their homes in terror. Over recent years, fewer and fewer people are fooled by the multicultural, women-led, gay-friendly façade that liberals have applied to the project of empire. When it comes to borders, prison, war and economic inequality, Trump has been able to expand on Democrats’ already imperialist, ruthless brutality — in part because of how the Biden administration (and Obama and Clinton before him) paved the way.
The Harris/Walz campaign revealed yet again that we cannot vote our way out of the U.S. government’s fundamental projects or liberalism’s imperialist, genocidal commitments.
We can’t afford to become immobilized by hopelessness, but we also can’t get lost in fantasies that we’ll vote in people’s champions in the next election (or the one after that), or that justice will be delivered by nonprofits, courts or media exposés. Fear and despair are understandable responses to the agony of realizing that despite our widespread mobilization and courageous resistance, the U.S. government will not become responsive to the urgent global crises or the will of the people — not now, and regardless of who runs it later. It is an entrenched war machine — it makes borders, prisons, cops and weapons.
Liberalism persists, in large part, through a fantasy that the U.S. government can be reformed to care for us, and that we should focus on trying to get it to do so. In reality, with war as the main event, care programs (education, Medicaid/Medicare, Social Security, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) are buttresses, designed not to contradict the colonial extraction project while barely (if at all) supporting the population. For the past half-century, these “softer” methods of maintaining control have been declining and the naked emphasis on control through armed domination is laid bare in the rapid growth of police, military and prison budgets.
Sometimes, in response to major uprisings, politicians (Democrat or Republican) grant small, conditional concessions (eviction moratoriums, pandemic checks, short-term promises to stop increasing police budgets), which can quickly be undone and revoked. As we drift rightward, concessions grow smaller, repression mounts and the pretense that the state is here to care for us becomes less necessary political leverage — and a more dangerous fantasy for us to believe.
Welfare programs, already racist, exclusionary, punitive and unlivable, have been steadily shredded by Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Both have undermined labor organizing and labor protections (often designed to pacify workers anyway), engaged policies that sent rents soaring while further criminalizing being unhoused, wildly expanded war, criminalization and border enforcement, and undermined health care access (especially stigmatized health care like abortion and trans healthcare). Despite this, liberals have desperately called for us to continue backing Democrats while they keep selling our lives to oil companies, war profiteers, cops and landlords, in hopes that we can preserve the crumbs people are relying on as conditions worsen.
It is heartbreaking that so many people have invested their time in detailed proposals for how we could live differently, banking on the hope that the massive infrastructure of the U.S. government could be turned toward making sure everyone has housing, transportation, food, water, and other basic necessities, toward ecosystem restoration and developing sustainable ways of living.
The painful fact is that these solutions haven’t been and will not be adopted at a level that would address the disasters we’re facing. At best, during some moment of legitimacy crisis, temporary, hollowed out, small scale versions will be offered as cover to the endemic militarism, policing, caging and repression.
For many, it is devastating to let go of hopes for policy solutions on climate, or governmental action to address structural racism, provide universal basic income, housing or quality health care for all people. But we must acknowledge that the U.S. can only be what it has always been, and what Trump’s years in office (and liberals’ responses to them) help further sharpen it toward: a machine of racialized extraction, concentrating wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands, leaving us with no say in what happens to everything we depend on for life. This election — in which the Democratic Party candidate parroted right-wing talking points on immigration, and promised not to ban fracking in order to compete with the Republican Party’s unapologetic fascism — should drive us toward action in our immediate spheres to prepare for an increasingly disaster-ridden, perilous future in which the U.S. government will respond with more guns and tanks, not care for our survival.
The fantasy of being saved by policy solutions (or tech solutions, or billionaires) is often what prevents us from doing vital, immediate work.
Now it is time to fully devote ourselves to direct action and mutual aid. When FEMA continues to fail, and inevitably delivers aid that is too little, too late, excluding marginalized and stigmatized groups, as always, local people’s disaster recovery is what actually works. As the border enforcement regime continues to expand, dedicated groups of people (always fewer than needed) continue direct support to help migrants cross the border safely, to support those locked in detention and their families, to help undocumented people and asylum seekers survive and stay out of the hands of the government. The fantasy of being saved by policy solutions (or tech solutions, or billionaires) is often what prevents us from doing this kind of vital, immediate work.
Rather than just wringing our hands about the fate of trans people being targeted by lawmakers in Texas, Tennessee and Florida, and watching in fear as core questions of trans survival are put before conservative courts, we can all be providing direct support to the trans youth in foster care systems, and trans people unhoused or in prison in our own towns and counties. And for those farther away, we can send money to help cover housing and medical expenses as people live with the ramifications of increasing repression, and provide crisis support across distance. Groups of trans people have been sending self-defense kits to trans women facing the brutal daily violence that ends so many lives. Specific support projects for trans asylum seekers and trans prisoners are helping keep people alive right now. With so many people in need and so few doing the work, when more of us shift our efforts toward direct support, it can really make a difference. Since the conditions we’re facing aren’t ever going to be resolved by going through official channels, this is our best and only viable option for material change.
Arms dealers, tech companies and governments aren’t going to be convinced to stop acting badly — they are fully aware of the consequences and committed to their path. Direct action — blockading, sabotaging, and otherwise physically stopping their projects — may seem small and diffuse, but these actions are proliferating (though they are rarely covered in mainstream news sources in favor of sanctioned “solutions”). More people taking action with greater and greater boldness is our best hope for stopping the expansion of the infrastructure of violence and extraction before it kills us all. Liberals encourage us to only use sanctioned methods of dissent, to keep our movements “peaceful” and defanged, and to stigmatize anyone who uses bolder tactics (meanwhile they persistently expand police and military capacity for violence).
Now is the moment to turn toward the most solid thing we actually have — each other. Can you imagine hundreds or thousands of people showing up to physically prevent evictions, like the flying squadrons, sometimes called “black bugs,” that protected 77,000 households in New York City in the early 1930’s through direct action? Can you imagine if we could free our people from jails and prisons, rather than begging for their captors to let them out? (I am especially thinking about this after North Carolina failed to evacuate prisoners during Hurricane Helene.) Can you imagine if we made and distributed our own medicines — including hormones for trans people, abortion drugs, insulin and antibiotics — so that we weren’t dependent on systems that stigmatize, criminalize and profit off our health needs? Can you imagine if blocking highways and deportation buses, shutting down airports, stopping police sweeps of homeless encampments, stopping ICE raids, and shutting down arms manufacturers were not things we just did for a number of hours, but as commitments over a lifetime? To succeed, we need way more people to show up to take these courageous actions. In the meantime, every attempt at bold action is a useful training ground as we develop these tactics and bring new people into the struggle.
Unfortunately, we’re also doing this in the context of increasing repression of our movements, which will only sharpen under Trump. Our opponents (including Republican and Democratic politicians, and law enforcement agencies) are targeting people across movements, using legal apparatuses, corporate surveillance structures, and public and private institutions to do their bidding. They are ruthless, persistent, with vast resources for harassing, criminalizing and stigmatizing people who are part of the resistance, whether we are campaigning to stop new police infrastructure, bailing people out of jail, protesting on campus, opposing genocidal U.S. foreign policy, or engaging in direct action. The ramping up of these repressive methods, already underway and about to soar, means we have to drastically increase our solidarity practices, from directly supporting people who are facing repression, to increasing our security practices and developing our analysis so we don’t accidentally undermine each other in our attempts at advocacy.
Resistance thrives at the local level, where interpersonal relationships, trust and local understandings of need and crisis are possible.
Many people long for something that is at the same scale as the massive military and economic systems that currently dominate us: a new political party, charismatic leader, unifying cause, or unsurveillable communications technology platform. Liberalism stokes and thrives on these desires. Arguing that it’s most pragmatic to work through huge, centralized, sanctioned channels (like legislatures, corporate media, large nonprofits or elections) actually prevents pragmatic action. Conservatives, warmongers, capitalists, racists — whether Democrats or Republicans — have captured all parts of government, including at the state and local levels. They know how to effectively deploy apparatuses of the state, following their own rules or not, locally and federally — not surprising, since the U.S. state was created to facilitate racial capitalism. It’s doing a bang-up job. It thrives at the depersonalized scale of systemic violence. Resistance, however, thrives at the local level, where interpersonal relationships, trust and local understandings of need and crisis are possible.
This is not a call to ignore what governments and institutions are doing — we must contend with them. It is an inquiry about how we contend with them differently once we entirely divest from the hope of taking them over or improving them to be other than what they are. Yes, we must absolutely pay attention to exactly how they are causing harm, beat back every inch of their expansion, and accompany and support everyone who is in their line of fire. But we do that very differently when we are no longer begging for recognition or moral action from them. We can’t let liberalism determine how and where we practice our politics, urging us to get seats at irrelevant tables, or support candidates who promise to operate the machines of domination differently. We must resist the logic that the only work that matters, or is important, or could save us has to mirror the scale and methods of the massive systems of extraction — based in law and policy reform, corporate media coverage, and other sites of elite death-dealing alongside occasional symbolic concessions.
It takes courage to let go of the idea that a sudden singular solution will fabricate a benevolent U.S., and to instead dig into the immediate, unglamorous, life-saving “small” work all around us. We will have to make do with what we already have, and stand up to opponents who have more money and guns than us, and we’ll have to rely on each other. There are no guarantees that our experiments will work. There are many unknowns: what it will take to stop the expansion of their life-destroying systems, or how much damage has already been done that will shape and shorten our lives, life on the planet, and existence of future generations. We can only guess at how much worse the repression might get, or what it will take to mobilize enough people to make a difference.
However, we have no alternative but to try. We know that officially sanctioned methods of dissent — giving to nonprofits, espousing our views on social media, voting, joining an occasional march or testifying before a legislative body — are not going to cut it. And absolutely everything is at stake.
Even as it is terrifying, it can be freeing to let go of the fantasy that some top-down solution will come save us. It opens us up to feel the enormous grief and rage these conditions provoke, rather than peddling in false hope about electoral solutions, fake renewable resources, and woefully inadequate, entirely symbolic, or even violence-expanding policy reforms made in the name of justice. It lets us turn toward heartfelt efforts to reduce suffering right now, wherever we can, following lessons learned by the billions of people living on Earth, and our long lineages of ancestors who have taken care of each other and fought like hell against oppressors with no guarantees of success. Through them and each other, we know that even in the face of outrageous odds we are capable of enormous courage and care, and that resisting together is worth it.